From Windows to the Xbox: Bill Gates' 'pioneering' impact

By Doug Gross, CNN

Updated 4:33 PM ET, Tue February 4, 2014

Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is stepping down as chairman of the board of the company, the world's largest software company. Gates was named on the Forbes World's Billionaires List for 12 consecutive years from 1995 to 2007. This photo was taken in Sydney in 2011. Take a look at a gallery showing Gates through the years.

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Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates poses outdoors with Microsoft's first laptop in 1986 at the new 40-acre corporate campus in Redmond, Washington. In March 1986, Microsoft held an initial public offering of 2.5 million shares. By the end of the year, Gates became a billionaire at the age of 31. Microsoft was the first company to dominate the personal computer market with its MS-DOS system and subsequently the Windows platform.

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Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates holds up Bookshelf, a new compact disc for computers which holds all the information contained in the books pictured.

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates, seen in Redmond, Washington, in 1986, created Microsoft, which is currently the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing, with over 39,000 employees in 60 countries.

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Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates demonstrates Microsoft's Windows 95 program from his automobile before a press conference in Paris in September 1994.

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Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates sits on stage during a video portion of the Windows 95 launch event on August 24, 1995, on the company's campus in Redmond, Washington. A Harvard University dropout, Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975.

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Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates and former U.S. President Bill Clinton attend a White House conference on "the New Economy" in April 2000.

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Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Britain's Queen Elizabeth II presents Gates with an honorary knighthood, as his wife, Melinda Gates, watches. Despite the 2005 honor, Gates can't use the title "Sir" because he's not a British citizen.

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Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates holds a new Palm Treo 700w smartphone during a keynote address at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates looks on as his wife, Melinda, holds a baby during their visit to a village in India's Bihar state on March 23, 2011. The mission of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is to "unlock the possibility inside every individual," according to its website.

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Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates, left, and Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, play table tennis during an event at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 6, 2012.

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Photos: Bill Gates' Microsoft moments15 photos

Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates, one of the world's richest men and highest-profile aid donors, gives a child a vaccination in Ghana on March 26, 2013. The Gates Foundation donates at least 5% of its assets each year to fight polio, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other infectious diseases across the globe.

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Bill Gates' Microsoft moments – Gates speaks during an interview with The Associated Press on January 21, 2014, in New York. Gates and his wife, Melinda, pitched an optimistic future for the world's poor and sick in their annual letter the same day.

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Story highlights

Bill Gates is stepping down as chairman of Microsoft's board

But he'll actually be there more as an adviser to new CEO

Under Gates, Microsoft has defined the computing world

Gates' company has defined desktop and workplace computing

To ask what impact Bill Gates has had on computing is, in a way, too small a question. For millions of people in the nearly four decades since he co-founded Microsoft, Gates has defined the entire field.

Whether browsing the Web on Internet Explorer on a PC running Windows or working up a PowerPoint presentation with Microsoft Office before taking a break to game on the Xbox, there are many among us whose entire digital experience have been filtered through products Gates helped create.

Gates co-founded the company with Paul Allen in 1975 but stepped down as CEO in 2000. He then spent eight years as Microsoft's chairman before stepping away from full-time work there in 2008 to focus on his charitable work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Rather than exiting the stage at the world's largest computer software company, Gates may actually be getting more active. He'll take on a new role as an adviser to Nadella, putting him back on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus more often. It will also put him nearer to the heart of innovation the company will need to keep up with rivals like Apple and Google at the top of the consumer-tech industry.

If he succeeds in helping Microsoft get back its swagger, particularly in a fast-growing mobile world dominated by Apple and Google and in the increasingly important field of cloud computing, it would be a final contribution to a career that has virtually defined an industry.

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"Bill Gates is one of the pioneering giants of the information age," said Merv Adrian, a software and hardware analyst at Gartner Research. "Driven by the belief in a computer in every home, on every desktop, he helped to build one of the largest firms in the world to achieve that goal -- and arguably succeeded."

For starters, Microsoft was the world's first real software company. Although there are hours of bare-knuckle geek brawling to be done over whether Gates and Microsoft or rival Steve Jobs and Apple were the true innovators on early computer interfaces, there's no question as to who succeeded in making software for the masses.

The result was something approximating that computer-on-every-desk dream. By making software a money-maker for itself and third-party developers, Microsoft helped retailers sell computers for less, making them accessible to more of the public.

Whether it was MS-DOS for early IBM machines or the more seismic release of Windows in 1985, Gates was behind them all.

Despite his reputation as an aggressive -- some would say predatory -- businessman, he has never been confused with a numbers guy who leaves the real work up to subordinates.

Gates wrote his first computer program, a tic-tac-toe game, at age 14 and formed his first company, again with Allen, at 17.

In Microsoft's early years, he wrote every line of code for the company's software while managing its business side. In that way, he set himself apart from rival Steve Jobs, who had a brilliant sense of design but was never much of a software engineer.

Gates' exacting product reviews were legendary within Microsoft, a fact that observers say puts him in a select fraternity of two in the computer world.

"The more time Bill spends on product development, the better," Geoffrey Moore, author of the technology marketing book "Crossing the Chasm," told the San Francisco Chronicle. "He and Steve Jobs seem very different on the outside, but at their core, they were very similar. They both see things that others don't see, and they're both very demanding."

As the years went on, Microsoft products continued to become more ubiquitous -- so much so that the company's seeming stranglehold on the computing world led to monopoly claims and antitrust lawsuits in the late '90s and early 2000s.

PowerPoint, part of the massively popular Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools, has joined the likes of Kleenex, Xerox and Coke in the pantheon of brand names used synonymously with an entire category of products.

Many PC users have probably never created a document without Microsoft Word, and number-crunchers everywhere would be lost without Excel's spreadsheets.

Microsoft's Hotmail, despite becoming seen as unfashionable by younger users, remained the world's most popular free e-mail service until 2012, when it was passed by Gmail before Microsoft merged it with Outlook.

And of course there's the Xbox, which became one of the gaming industry's "Big Three" consoles, along with Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PlayStation, upon its release in 2001. Thirteen years later, the new Xbox One continues to do battle with the PlayStation 4 for the hearts and wallets of gamers.

All were delivered under the guidance of Gates.

"The pervasiveness of information technology was by no means clear when he began driving to it," Adrian said. "And today it is a fact of life, embedded into everyone's life to a degree that only science-fiction writers imagined when he was building his first software."

Will Gates' new role mean a batch of new products that we'll still be talking about 10 or 20 years from now? That may be a stretch. But in a video message posted online Tuesday, Gates said he'll be "substantially increasing" the time he spends at Microsoft. And he sounds up to the challenge.

"Microsoft has a long history of innovation, going back to the beginning, where the vision of the personal computer was something that Microsoft helped bring to life," he said. "Our vision of the platform ... really initiated the entire software industry.

"As the industry changes, we have to innovate to move forward," he said. "It'll be fun to define this next round of products working together."